Robomowers: rise of the machines

With 'Malcolm’ the robomowe at his command, life will never be the same for
Douglas Robin

The future has a name, and in my world it’s called Malcolm. Malcolm is very discreet but totally dedicated and relentless. He may have acquired a reputation for ruthless efficiency but he has earned the respect, and perhaps even the affection, of the family.

Initially it was unnerving to watch him trundling up and down the lawn under his own steam, plotting his next move and realising, like an Edwardian horseman on seeing his first motor car, that an established rhythm of your life is about to change for ever.

In our household that rhythm, almost every summer weekend for the last seven years, has been drummed by the put-put of the petrol engine on a propelling Hayter Harrier 650, as we marched in tandem up and down the third-of-an-acre lawn cutting and rolling our beloved stripes into place.

Many men – and let’s face it, it’s mostly a man’s job – will tell you that mowing is a cathartic experience. Man meditation to the chant of a small power train shrouded in the evocative scent of fresh grass clippings, all with the prospect of a gin and tonic later as the sun sets as reward for a job well done.

On the other hand, it’s also physically demanding, time-consuming, grubby drudgery. Emptying a heavy grass collector is probably the most rigorous challenge but the machinery wrangling and the walk are not for the unfit or infirm.

The obvious answer for the larger garden, I hear you cry, is a tractor mower, and who hasn’t thought about or enjoyed roaring around, beer in one hand, steering wheel in the other, tipping your baseball cap to the noise-polluted neighbours?

But then there is the purchase cost (£3,000 plus for a decent model), the prospect of hitting a hidden tree stump, not to mention the punctures, buying the petrol, the maintenance, the issue of dumping the clippings, and the time involved in all of this.

And then Malcolm arrived and everything changed. He is my robot, a thinking, sensitive Israeli drone.

The rise of the machines is happening right now in this garden in Surrey, although the makers say the robot lawnmower revolution is much further advanced elsewhere in Europe.

Malcolm is so quiet we have taken to running him at night when all you see is a blinking red light moving in the garden, and you wake to a lawn coiffured to the fairway finish of a decent golf club.

He needs about half a day to settle in and some ground rules. A thin green wire must be pegged down as a perimeter to his cutting area. If it’s done accurately he will edge flower beds and borders neatly, and cut tight round trees and even under the trampoline. He won’t cut every blade perfectly first time, especially on long rough growth, but like the grass terminator he is, he’ll be back, going over the same patch two, three or four times as he tracks tirelessly across the lawn in a seemingly random but planned pattern.

What’s more he mulches. And I don’t mean mulch like lawnmower salesmen tell you a mower mulches. He eviscerates clippings so finely with his strange triangular cutting blades that even in the wet I’ve yet to spot a meaningful scrap on a shoe.

Oh, and Malcolm has a moisture sensor so he knows when it’s raining too hard to cut. If he hits something solid he stops, backs off and steers round it, although he did chew a child’s shoe that hadn’t been spotted and cleared away from under the trampoline.

Currently he has Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday off, but via his control panel or smartphone application you can run him as little or as often as you like, and the cutting height is adjustable. A modest downside is his small recharging station, which Malcolm, who is about 1ft high and 2ft square, returns to automatically when he’s not working. It requires a mains power supply so it sits on the lawn closest to the house with a cable running to it across the patio. It’s a little unsightly but it seems a small price to pay, and for now at least it’s a novel talking point.

During his first autonomous run we followed him around mesmerised. Technically he is the Robomow RS622, but my eldest son immediately dubbed him Malcolm and the name has stuck. He – the son that is – is delighted as we can spend a lot more time together playing football and cricket, and no time preparing the playing surface. That means a lot to all of us.

Just to see how much I missed my stripes I hauled the Hayter out on Sunday. Let’s just say it felt so old-fashioned that it quickly returned to the shed.

I mentioned all this to a heart consultant friend at a party on Saturday night. He laughed and said he pays a real gardener, also called Malcolm, to cut his lawn. Perhaps it’s best he doesn’t come round to look at the competition.